skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I must've read this very differently. I rolled my eyes and skipped over the experience table. I've seen one too many programmers with literally decades of experience but still without a clue.

But the rest… I assume it's a matrix for a reason. Someone isn't a level log(n) programming mage, but he or she might be a level log(n) data structure and algorithm wielder, a level n^2 systems programming apprentice, and a level n requirements gatherer, or some other combination of strengths and weaknesses. It's still a lossy abstraction, but significantly less so taken that way.
I was mostly replying to your assertion that "that's not even remotely how strcmp is implemented", which, for most definition of "even remotely", is false.

> All of these abstraction possibilities are available to C

That's a tautology at best, and meaningless at worst. The way strcmp() is implemented, which we discussed above, is not actually available in C.

> Any C application where comparison of long almost-identical strings is important will surely use techniques similar to what Python does.

And similarly, any Python application that requires (insert some uncommon requirement ..) can do what C can with the same kind of help that strcmp() gets - by delegating to the layer that does it best.

> Python does not have access to all the same optimizations that a C programmer could draw upon to do string processing.

Pure python is more limited than C, true. But specific Python implementations (RPython, PyPy, IronPython) might have better access to some optimizations than specific C implementations.

And there's always the aspect of "what's theoretically possible" and "what happens in practice". The fact that PyPy will dynamically switch from 32-bit to 64-bit to unbounded-long-integer might make a real difference on a 32-bit machine where the code might occasionally require 2048 bits, but overwhelmingly requires just 32 bits.

It is possible to construct pathological cases where there are e.g. pow(2,128) possible type combinations within a function, the exact combination is only known from the data (but is consistent for an entire run) - in which case, PyPy will essentially compile the right program to machine code, whereas you cannot do AOT because of the number of combinations; which means a C program will essentially be an interpreter based on those types.

But I don't care about theoretically constructed pathologies. In practice, especially with time-to-implement constraints, it is not true that a C programmer has all the tools at their disposal that higher level languages have.
By law, they're available everywhere if you specifically request them.

Verizon, when they install FIOS, will rip out the copper, by default. If you switch to another CLEC at a later date, you (or they) will have to pay to have copper put back in. You can request Verizon not remove the copper though, but you have to be aware of the need beforehand.
Google Faces Potential Class-Action Lawsuit In Canada
Not if you're selling a brand and not a product. They're at that point now where they can basically sell anything with absolute disregard for quality control.

The little round plastic pads under a MBP I bought about a year ago are falling off, they were just glued.

But they're figured out their audience and they're making billions so bravo.
In italian "bega" is a colloquial way to refer to a problem ("bega legale" for a legal problem) and an even more colloquial/trivial way to refer to the male sexual organ in some dialect (probably in Ligury) :-)
personally, i like swipe. If i see it start loading, i know that there's virtually no chance of interesting content on the pages that follow, so i can back out quickly. It seems as though the only sites that use it are terrible blogspam sites like extremetech.
Google,Mozilla et. al. come together to create an open standardized web
HTC misses targets yet again
Instagram does it so I think it should be fine.
this site runs on php, that is pretty cool! Then again php is good for wiki pages
Banks and PayPal are regulated to the same degree. Banks do freeze merchant accounts exactly the same way PayPal freezes accounts, for exactly the same reasons, for exactly the same periods of time. They have exactly the same policies because these policies come down from the Visa and MasterCard Operating Regulations that both banks and PayPal are bound to.

PayPal is licensed in all 50 states and is a registered bank in more than a handful of countries. Whatever difference you think there would be if they were also a bank in the US, instead of just having their accounts underwritten by two banks (JP Morgan Chase and Wells Fargo NA), I don't think that difference exists.

@dkl: I'd like to reply to your comment but it's [dead] and there's no contact info in your bio. The answer should be fairly obvious if you think about it, and has been discussed on HN in virtually every previous thread about PayPal. I've had my own merchant account underwritten by the largest private bank in the United States frozen in the past.
The headline has been changed though the URL is still the same (which is expected given the way most CMSes work).
That's basically what I'm suggesting. It works well as long as the web is your primary sales channel. Definitely get the email before the reveal, though. I'd do it as a page with radio buttons for pricing options, a call-to-action button that emphasizes purchase ("buy now" or "sign up now"), and a follow-on page that asks for email and payment method choice (credit card, paypal, purchase order).
Oatmeal fundraiser for Tesla museum is a triumph
Using 'pls' in formal communication indicates sloppiness and imprecision of thought. It indicates that one is not serious. A mental flyweight.

Shorter: spelling counts.
> You're talking yout of your ass.

And you are perfectly scientifically illiterate.

> In preparation for vietnam, the US armed forces studied lethality of intent for small arms fire.

Yes, they did, But it was not a scientific study -- no control group. No basis for comparing results. No basis for falsification. As a result, they "discovered" exactly what they expected to discover.

The entire Vietnam episode was based on the opinions of experts, not scientific study. And I am hardly the only one to make this observation.

> This book is/was a textbook used in the armed forces, it is a summary of working papers etc.

Yes, and it is not science. I now realize I'm talking to someone who doesn't understand what makes science science. And that is ... drum roll ... falsifiable theoretical claims, claims that someone could in principle conclusively falsify in practical tests. There are none in the book you cite -- it's a sequence of anecdotes and philosophical speculations.

> It is not some BS handwavey claptrap from academia.

I agree with the "from academia" part -- but it is certainly contentless philosophical speculation rather than science. There are no testable, falsifiable claims between its covers.
This is a quote I use very often! As with many other great quotes, I think it originates in English from Trevanian's Shibumi (when Otake-san, the Go master is giving his final teaching to Nicholai):

Do not fall into the error of the artisan who boasts of twenty years experience in his craft while in fact he has had only one year of experience — twenty times.

Most probably Trevanian has drawn upon some other source, tough I've never been able to track that.

If you haven't read this fantastic book I strongly recommend it.
It may be bad for business but that doesn't mean they will have a choice in the matter. And unlike in the US they may not even have the option of being transparent about how much they have to hand over. It's a very different world legally over there.
Frankly, asking the question either way is what I would call prejudicial. What is a scenario in which bipartite graphs occur, and why not ask how that would be dealt with?
I'm not suggesting a formal paper LOI; if they're email people, email is fine. But I think there's a big psychological difference between somebody saying, "Oh, we'd pay X" in response to an interview question and them saying in writing that they will pay X when the product is available if it meets their needs.

I agree that not many potential customers will be so needy that they'll do that. But not many potential customers will be so needed that they'll actually sign up and pay, so I think that's fine.
TURING TEST PRIZE HAS TWO WINNERS
ASRock X79 Extreme4-M
ASRock X79 Extreme4-M-is the most important component in your computer. Due to the motherboard of your computer identifies opportunities. With ASRock X79 Extreme4-M can greatly increase the speed of your computer and its performance. It also supports multi-core processors, equipped with four slots supporting dual-channel mode, so work at your computer will become more comfortable. The motherboard ASRock X79 Extreme4-M can connect other devices required by additional slots on the board.
Random question, is category theory helpful in working out equations with quantum topology?
Writers of novelists have their works publicly available. What about someone who writes documentation for the launch code for nuclear submarines? While I will probably never ever see that documentation, it's really important that it is done well.

A corporate lawyer may produce a whole bunch of excellent work that the outside world never sees. Yet he keeps the company complaint with regulations.

If we were to do "show me the github" for stonemasons, we would want to see the pretty works of art that someone has made and select for that. But what about the guy who worked for 20 years laying the stone to keep the buildings up? He can't show off his work. But if I work in his building every day, I'm going to care a lot more that he was selected based on his ability to choose the stone that keeps buildings up than on his art.

The majority of code never sees the light of day. We are much more like miners than mathematicians in that the public cannot see our immediate work product, only the results after it has worked as a team. If you've never been hired you obviously can have all of your stuff public, but that's just selecting against people who have worked.

Analogies are hard.
Not a disclaimer, merely shameless (and not at all shameful) and worthy self-promotion.
Harvard Carr Center for Human Rights Policy Hacked, Password was "DOG"?
It took me about 20 minutes to form a C corp in NJ , using the state's website. I don't know how much easier it can get. BTW, if you have an LLC , you still have to file the S corp election form with the IRS.
All I can say is that you should definitely speak with an accountant before deciding what is best for your situation
Everyone should program, or Programming is Hard?
Oops, I was thinking of Long Island rather than Long Island City. Thanks for the correction.
Try to withhold your ideologically motivated commentary until you have said knowledge.
That one caught me up too. Maybe if you have full control of the input data and performance is not a concern, then they should be avoided, but "never" is a pretty small set.
Judging from the debris on the video, they didn't collect their garbage.
You are not alone: www.youtube.com/watch?v=F-QA2rkpBSY
Most of the web was built by people who don't know what B-trees are.

By number of sites, perhaps. By revenue, I don't think so. The big names that dominated what the web is to most people certainly do know this stuff, at least insofar as the practical implications, and they try not to hire people that don't for development roles. That isn't to say that they don't also just use Postgres (or Berkeley DB, or whatever) instead of writing their own.

If the automotive industry were like computing, we'd use the phrase "auto mechanic" to refer to...

I totally agree with this - the field could use a few more job titles (and a little less grade inflation - SENIOR software engineer on 2 years experience? Really?) Software Fitter would be a much better description for the skilled assembly role that a lot of modern software boils down to. CRUD Technician is going to to need some PR work though!
Introducing Devel::SizeMe – Visualizing Perl Memory Use
3 Secrets To A Killer Demo
Maybe they should have added "The" in front of the title.
The reason why it is usually considered irrational/illogical is because hyperbolic discounting leads to dynamically inconsistent preferences. For example, under hyperbolic discounting I may prefer $100 today to $150 in one month, but prefer $150 in 61 months to $100 in 60 months. It's the same rate of discounting in both cases ($50 for an additional month of delay) but my preferences are not consistent.

Of course, there are other criteria for rationality besides coherence/consistency (as the wikipedia article alludes to).
Ah yes, you have got to love rocket scientist terminology. The wikipedia page for the Vanguard rocket used to have an image of one of them exploding captioned with "
Vanguard rocket undergoing rapid unplanned disassembly shortly after launch at Cape Canaveral".
Is there any way to autogenerate playground schema from tastypies's schemas?
Here's mine:

Level 0: Saw the post title and didn't think he needed to look at it because he was so confident in his abilities already.

Level 1: Read the post, noticed a lot that he didn't know but didn't intend to do anything about it.

Level 2: Read the post and went out and learned everything in it that he didn't know.

Level 3: Read the post, figured out which things from it he didn't know but might need to or want to, and learned those.

Oh, and a special level -1: Read the post, noticed a lot of things that he didn't know, and decided the post was stupid because clearly he's an amazing programmer and the post didn't agree with that self-assessment.
A misleading headline. There are no realistic candidates to "win" a true Turing test. Even Watson, who won Jeopardy, would not be accepted as human in a fair, open-ended interview meant to uncover errors in an effort to pass as human:

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/17/science/17jeopardy-watson....
No, it's not sarcasm.
Yes, too bad the full text is behind a paywall. So I haven't read the full study, but I was once upon a time a teenager.

I recall many aspects of my and my peer's psychological lives that would not be easily available to an outside researcher as part of their "comprehensive set of potential 3rd variables".
I definitely think phone numbers are the IP address of personal communications. Can you imagine if we had to type in http://74.125.224.72/ to hit Google.com? However, I would argue that cell phones have provided a DNS-like solution for the phone number problem. It's not perfect; people can change phone numbers, and we still have to exchange numbers to be able to call each other, but this is somewhat by design. If there was a DNS for phone numbers, which this Sprint StarStar sounds like, it would be too easy for people you don't want calling you to call you (it's already fairly easy... I'm sure Justin Beiber could testify to this). A phone number is like a crappy, public password for people to call a number that may or may not be associated with you.

Just a few thoughts I had based on the last paragraph: the problem is that phone numbers are arbitrary--nothing connects people and the numbers they hold temporarily. However, a DNS system for individual phone numbers is also suboptimal because it allows everyone access to everyone. What about a password protected DNS system? Everyone gets a phone number/ip address and is able to password protect access to it? Snowball with me here people.
How to Run a Sales Meeting that Doesn't Suck
As is the birth month in European culture. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Astrology
Hack temporarily turns WoW towns into piles of corpses
I'm getting a database error at the moment.
Saudi Arabia Uses Your Gas Dollars To Fund...Solar Energy
It's like MDN, only much worse.

Why build another low-quality MDN?
Is MongoDB actually able to combine 2 or more indices?
Offering what's best for the customer is a balancing act with what's best for the company. If only 2% of your customers are likely to have issues with a given item, it may not be worth raising the price 10% for everyone just to appease those 2%. (disclaimer, I'm picking random numbers here, no relation to the item in question)
Sorry, I'm just rebooting the sever. Looks like it just got battered!
Does SEO work in HN comments? I know it doesn't on reddit, so I wouldn't be surprised.
That's ok on a forum, but not on a site that tries to appear professional and elegant (and buzzword-y). Personally, I also think the font used on the "About Us" page for "What you need" and so on does not mesh all that well with the rest of the site.
12 Tips for Killing It on Twitter
I'm sorry I found it all very confusing. For me personally it failed the 5 second test - what is the site primarily about, and how can I extract 80% of its functionality quickest?

I clicked on the Buy button and was no further forward.

The design is very slick, but there's too many words on the front page, no obvious action button/s and no immediate examples of how this could benefit me.
Good luck finding the software versions of James Jamerson, Papa Zita and Eddie Willis, the master of the guitar "chink".
They say they're in alpha. Has to start somewhere, right?
I work on the Kinect for Windows team and would love to hear from anyone who is working on a K4W project or has an idea. My job is to empower developers to build amazing experiences so please hit me up if you have questions or need any help. @benlower or kinectninja at microsoft dot com.
Galaxy of Voters
No - it can only use one for a given query. But a compound index like the ones I describe in the post can index many fields.
I personally take stereotypes as a challenge to prove someone wrong.

I guess it is just how you respond to the stressors of a possible static constraint implied upon you. Do you accept their conclusion or decide to find your own?
May I ask you to try the 5 seconds test with my profile? https://www.workio.com/u/MjA3ZD/luca-hammer

Does that work for you?
World of Minecraft (Azeroth Crafted using 68 Billion Blocks in Minecraft)
MIT admissions: The Pink Hair Problem
Maybe it had only one upvote, 155 times.
Alongside Google, Microsoft, HP, and Nokia's logos? I wonder ...
Since this is a tool that creates an output format, I think it is expected that if you find it you have a general idea of what it does. I don't believe there is an onus on the developer to include information about a general topic the tool is for (if they did, they would need tdo include what grunt is, what jsmin is, what sourcemaps are, why they are good, blah blah blah)

That being said, sourcemaps are a new feature in web dev environments that allows you to debug the compressed javascript as though it is it original uncompressed file. It does this by taking a automatically generated file created by the javascript compressor that is referenced in the compiled javascript as a comment. More in depth - http://www.html5rocks.com/en/tutorials/developertools/source...
If spacex says there is an engine fairing, I'm going to say there is one.
I had a 55mpg Geo Metro back in '92, 20 years later we have a Prius C with about the same mileage (although the Prius is much better around town.)

But we also have a station wagon and an old pickup. I think one thing that makes it hard for the average US car owner to go for very efficient vehicles is that at least some trips will require more passenger and/or cargo space. Given that gas is still relatively cheap there's not enough incentive to buy an efficient car if it's the only car you buy.

Seems like it would be pretty easy these days to insure/register/tax a fleet of cars for a household and encourage the cheapest alternative. Soccer mom could still use the minivan a couple times a week but use the Prius for shopping trips. You could meter each car and then pay a usage-based fee at the end of the month.
Huh? You _want_ early exits in c code how else will the compiler optimize?
But you were being paid through Paypal as a freelancer. I'm guessing that makes you a business for Paypal.
Just as an anecdote from a self-taught, I few years ago I started in on GoF and got about 100 pages in before I came to the conclusion that a lot of what I'd read so far and was attempting to incorporate into my knowledgebase is already a part of the languages I'm currently using.

I know there's a use for these details, I want to learn them, but I suspect that many times the direct context is built-in, which is pretty much what you say about learning frameworks, which may be possible to consider as dialects of a language. In fact, by Googling I see that people have written about language subsets in the context of Lisp, so full-circle I go.
The United States of ALEC: Secretive Corporate-Legislative Body Writing Our Laws
Yeah, the shipped the best and most performant mobile browser for years, but omitted one small feature that no-one has implemented well for nefarious purposes.
Yeah now i see from the slow-mo that the aerodynamic shell got ruptured, but it's no big deal, it's obviously not designed to handle any loads from INSIDE.
Right, but their care about the customer is a means to an end. The way some people talk about it makes it sound like they believe that Apple has genuine care for their customers as an end in itself.
As someone pointed out above, the robots.txt may be like that because the site hasn't been deemed properly ready. (And similarly, the site isn't fully developed so the blog isn't set up yet.)
Yes of course, but it's kinda slow if you have to maintain one compound index for each possible query you're going to run, that's why I was asking.
>If your business revolves around selling on eBay, PayPal is the only viable choice.

Then either your business model needs to change, or you need to follow the rules (i.e. no trusts owning an account) that you agreed to when you signed up. Those are the two options.

Whether or not paypal sucks has no bearing on the fact that the author was in violation of the terms of service he agreed to and had his account terminated for it.

Could they have handled it better? Sure. Are they under any obligation to? Nope.

Again, if this were a random individual person I would sympathize completely, but you do not, as a business, enter any contract without full appreciation for the terms you're binding yourself and your organization to. Just because he was ignorant of those terms doesn't mean they don't exist.
How to Build Habits with Google Forms
We desperately need some new ideas in aerospace. Here is one for an airship to orbit, that would use EHD thrusters to get to orbit electrically, maybe with energy beamed from the ground in microwaves:

http://www.jpaerospace.com/

Here is more about the EHD effect and lifters, including the TT Brown effect:

http://jnaudin.free.fr/

It's all real and has been replicated numerous times. I think it's a shame that it's not covered in history books.

It would be straightforward to build a saucer or some other shape to get to the edge of space and then use conventional rockets to get to orbital speed. But research like that isn't funded for the same reason that green energy is barely funded - it's not sexy. There's little profit in it. And people with money just don't have the vision to pull it off. It breaks my heart that geeks are getting people to click ads or working as quants on wall street instead of picking the low lying fruit that could take us into the 21st century.
It's important to also put either answer in the context of how it will affect the Time, Cost and Quality Triangle of program management. The customer loves to hear 'yes' but sometimes don't realize that that 'yes' is going to typically mean more time and/or money.
Art imitates life I guess.

I'm fairly certain that projects of this nature were modeled after UFO reports (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foo_fighter), and not the cause of them themselves (who would fly a top-secret aircraft in full view of the public, anyway?)

(yes, to any younger folks out there who don't already know, the band of the same name was named after the phenomenon)